


Snowflakes

by nightsofreylo



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Ben Drives Rey Home, Bittersweet Meet-Cute, Bullying, Caught in Snowstorm, Don't Get Into Stranger's Cars In Real Life!!!!, F/M, Foster Care, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Rey Is An Angry Snowball, Reylo - Freeform, Reylo Fanfiction Anthology 2017, first snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 23:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12221424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightsofreylo/pseuds/nightsofreylo
Summary: The girl standing on the side of the road is the most beautiful thing Ben has ever seen, even with her hair wet and her lips chapped. Even with her eyelashes frozen with little beads of ice that glitter like stars against her hazel eyes. Even with her breath coming out in gasps, sending white clouds into the air, and her too-thin body shaking with cold.He rolls down the passenger-side window. Snow begins to fall into his car.“Get in,” he tells her.





	Snowflakes

**I.**

 

The grass in Jakku is parched and dry. It blurs before Rey’s eyes as she sinks further down into her seat, trying to ignore the tightness in her throat and the ache in her stomach.

“Were you paying attention in Mr. Skywalker’s class?” a voice says over her shoulder. Teedo. The senior leans over the bus seat, resting on his forearms so that he can whisper to her. His mouth is so close to her ear that she can feel his breath, hot against her neck. He inhales and makes a quiet, retching noise. She closes her eyes, wanting to cry.

When school had started in September, she purposefully sat close to the front of the bus, hoping that her proximity to an adult would delay the inevitable.

But here, like everywhere else Rey has lived, people are cruel. Or perhaps they are just indifferent. The bus driver for number 374 is an old, rank man who wears a baseball cap and smells like cigarette smoke. Today, as he has for the past sixty-eight days, he ignores what is happening to her.

“Hey,” Teedo says. “I’m talking to you.”

Rey looks out the window. Outside, the suburban two-story houses pass by, each one barely distinguishable from the next. She counts the houses, trying to ignore her tormentor.

Teedo clears his throat and shoves himself away from her. For a moment, Rey thinks that he is finally going to leave her alone. But then he stands in his seat, and in a precise imitation of their teacher’s voice, calls out mockingly to his friends, “Can anyone use the word ‘scavenger’ in a sentence?”

Teedo’s forced inflection mirrors Mr. Skywalker’s tone perfectly. He sounds just like the old, tired teacher. It sends up a round of raucous laughter among his friends. Her face burns.

“Did anyone read the chapter that I assigned last night?” Teedo goes on, this time putting a slightly exasperated edge into his voice. “Anyone?”

“I think Rey did,” another boy crows, sending another chorus of laughter through the group. Every eye in the bus is drawn to them. To Rey.

Teedo turns to her, eyes gleaming, enjoying the show. “Remind me what your answer was?”

Rey stares back at him over her shoulder, humiliated and too afraid to speak. She is suddenly and completely aware that her jeans are ripped and dirty, that her hair hasn’t been washed in days, and that there are oil stains across her t-shirt. She pulls her jacket tighter around her, praying that they are almost to Teedo’s stop.

Grover’s Circle…

Crescent Hill Road…

“‘A scavenger is a person who searches for and collects discarded items.’” Teedo recites her own definition back to her, a carnivorous grin spreading across his face. “‘It’s someone who sees the value in things that other people think are worthless.’”

Rey wishes she could go back in time, to before she had raised her hand in class.

“Isn’t that what you said?” he taunts her, daring her to deny it.

“That’s what I said,” Rey replies, staring him down, willing herself not to cry. She doesn’t want him to think that she is as weak as she feels.

“And you would know…wouldn’t you, Junkyard Girl?”

He’s looming over her now, blocking her escape into the aisle. His hair is black and greasy in a way that only an unkempt teenage boy can manage. He’s pathetic, Rey realizes suddenly, no longer afraid. A pathetic, entitled little boy, with no respect for anybody.

“You’re like those junkyard dogs, scrounging around for scraps,” he murmurs. Despite his words, his eyes roam from her face to her body. “I bet you’re just like those skinny little mutts, I bet you howl like a bitch in heat when-”

Without her fear, all that’s left is her anger. It rises under her palms, spreading through her veins like a vicious current, and she lashes out suddenly. Her hand makes contact with his face, her fingernails scraping gouges along his cheek.

He stumbles back in shock, but Rey isn’t satisfied by the little lines of blood she has drawn…if anything, they incite her further. She slams into him, but even though he is a year older and much bigger than her, she feels like the powerful one. Before she can stop to think, he’s beneath her on the ground. Heat flares across her knuckles, again and again. The other students are shouting, some cheering her on, some laughing, some chanting.

She doesn’t stop hitting him.

 

**II.**

 

Rey can hear Unkar Plutt talking to the principal through the heavy wooden door. She sits in one of the hard chairs in the front office, directly across the room from Teedo. His parents are bookended on either side of him, the perfect family. Mr. Docherty is wearing a suit. Mrs. Docherty is wearing designer jeans and a polo shirt. They call him Theodore and look at Rey like she is dangerous. A rabid animal.

Teedo’s right eye is already bruising and swollen shut, and his left eye is trained on the floor. There is a bloody split in his bottom lip. Four gouges trail down his cheek, but Rey can’t bring herself to feel sorry for him.

She looks down at her hands. Her knuckles are red. There is blood under her nails.

She should know better by now.

Unkar Plutt emerges from the principal’s office. Dread rises in Rey’s throat, making it impossible for her to breathe. He pulls her up by her arm, his thick fingers wrapping around the space between her shoulder and her elbow.

“Let’s go,” he mutters.

He marches her in silence through the tiled hallways, to the side entrance by the parking lot. Only when they’re outside does he begin to speak to her.

“How dare you waste my time like this? Making me come down here when I should be at work,” Plutt says. “When you should be at work. You’re lucky I don’t throw you out of my house, girl.”

“Are they going to kick me out of school?” Rey dares to ask.

They come to his truck. He turns her around, pushing her against the rusted frame and shaking her by her shoulders.

“Three days,” he grunts, his face close to hers, his breath sour. “You’re suspended for three days. Be grateful I was here to talk them out of expelling you.”

Relief grips her. She can still go to class. She can still keep those seven hours for herself.

“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” he grunts, displeased by her silence.

“Thank you,” Rey says meekly, the words burning her tongue like acid.

“I don’t think you mean that.”

“I do mean it,” Rey says, her voice quivering. “I’m sorry.”

“You know what I think? I think you need some time to think about what you’ve done,” Plutt says. “I think you can walk home.”

He pulls open the driver’s-side door beside her and clambers inside, his barrel belly brushing the wheel.

“But it’s five miles. Unkar, please…”

He regards her with dispassionate eyes. “And you know what else? The Docherty’s don’t want you riding the bus with their son anymore, and the school’s decided that’s a pretty damn valid concern. So you can walk home every day for the rest of the year, too.”

He slams the door and revs the engine. Rey watches his truck pull out of the school lot. She watches until it is a brown speck on the horizon.

 

**III.**

 

For five weeks, Rey rises with the sun and walks to school in the early hours of the morning, when the sky is a pale lavender-gray. Those are the walks she enjoys. She likes watching the sun coming up over the red-gold trees and the brown fields, gilding the grey world with color. It is the walk home after school that she dreads, because she is already tired.

Rey tells herself that the sooner she begins the walk, the sooner it will be over, but that gives her only a little comfort. There will be more work waiting for her when she gets home.

If her shoes were old at the beginning of the school year, by December they are falling apart. Every day she seems to have a blister in a new place. Her heels are cracked and dry. The arches of her feet ache.

Even after the last of the leaves have fallen and the days have grown shorter and colder, she refuses to ask Unkar to drive her to and from school, knowing what his answer will be. Her feet might hurt and she might sleep through half of English, but her pride remains intact.

Once she gets over those small pains, the walk home becomes pleasant in an unexpected kind of way. There is a repetition to the rise-and-fall, rise-and-fall of her footsteps on the pavement. She memorizes the names of the streets as she passes them. If she cuts through the small wooded area behind Reserve Street, it shaves ten minutes off the walk…but usually she doesn’t.

The walk gives her an hour and fifteen minutes, sometimes just a little longer, before Unkar starts looking for her at home. It’s not really freedom - she knows where the road ends. But those minutes are hers. Never mind that when she arrives home, Unkar will put her to work in the garage. Never mind that starting that work a couple hours late means that she’ll be awake into the early hours of the morning trying to finish her homework. Never mind that every day she grows hungrier, sadder, harder.

She can ignore all those things. They are like the blisters on her feet, an irritation that will not turn her from her path.

When it comes, the cold is harder to ignore.

 

**IV.**

 

The snow is inside Rey’s shoes.

Her legs feel as though they are covered in a fine layer of frost instead of denim. Every step is a battle, the wind biting at her face. With the snowstorm raging around her, she can barely see three feet ahead of her. If she can just make it to the main part of town, she might be able to seek shelter in one of the shops, or the library. There are banks of snow that form little hills on the side of the road and cover the sidewalk, forcing her onto the partially-shoveled pavement that is still slick with ice.

Fortunately, there are few cars on the road in this weather, so she doesn’t have to worry about getting hit.

Rey thinks of Unkar Plutt’s warm garage, of the sparks and heat that fly off a welder, of dry clothing and blankets. She thinks of the arid heat of her former foster parents’ home in Arizona, of sweating through her shirt at night, of the way her thighs stuck to the school chairs whenever she stood up. Casting her memory back even further, she conjures hazy images of the swampy heat of Georgia and the mosquito-ridden lake where she’d played as a little girl, her hands in the mud, digging up snails.

They are not necessarily happy thoughts, because she has not led a happy life, but they keep her walking when her teeth clack together and her fingers start to feel numb even inside the pockets of her jacket.

The snow is coming down hard now. It seeps through her jacket, sleet drowning her shirt until it sticks against her skin. She is shaking, her hair wet, her eyes stinging from the wind.

She’s seen snow in movies, read about it in books…but she never expected it to be so _cold_. Instead of falling gently and prettily, it cuts through her clothes and her skin, prickling and biting, until it feels like her blood is freezing and her bones are ice. If she works harder, if she stays out of trouble, maybe…maybe Unkar will give her the money to buy a new coat.

It’s her fault. She should never have hit Teedo. If she had just kept her head down on the bus - if she had been good and quiet - she wouldn’t be here. This is her punishment, and she deserves it.

A black car crawls past her, very slow on the ice-slicked road. At first, she thinks its driver doesn’t notice her, the world around them a flurry of white. But then the car slows further and rolls to a stop, waiting for her until she is level with it.

The windows are tinted. The ice slides from the passenger-side window in a sheet as it rolls down, some of the frozen, wet clumps falling into the car.

The driver is a boy, about her age, maybe a little older. He is wearing a heavy, black coat and dark blue jeans. They look nice. Nicer than her clothes.

She looks at his face. The first thing she thinks is that he looks angry. His brown eyes darken as he takes in the sight of her - a scrawny, shivering girl standing knee-deep in snow on the side of a Jakku backroad - and the fingers of his left hand tighten where they rest on the steering wheel. The second thing Rey thinks is that he looks sad. Or maybe lonely.

Like her.

There’s something about him that makes her think of big, terrifying things: endless woods after dark, satellites in deep space, the scary things that live at the bottom of the ocean, the swirling pools of a tidal river, lightning hitting sand.

This boy makes her think of quiet, earthen things, too. Roots drinking up water after a storm, misty fog rolling over green-blue hills in the early morning, a silvery moth landing on a black tree, and droplets of dew gathered on farmhouse windows.

He wakes her up; he calms her; he calls to her heart with something other than words.

“Get in,” he says, with a voice that makes her forget she is cold.

 

**V.**

 

The girl standing on the side of the road is the most beautiful thing Ben has ever seen, even with her hair wet and her lips chapped. Even with her eyelashes frozen with little beads of ice that glitter like stars against her hazel eyes. Even with her breath coming out in gasps, sending white clouds into the air, and her too-thin body shaking with cold.

The first snowstorm of the year, and she doesn’t have a coat. Why doesn’t she have a coat?

Ben’s mind catches up, still disoriented by how unbelievably stunning she is. The girl has a threadbare, brown jacket that is drenched with half-frozen sleet. Her face is completely drained of color, except for the tinge of blue in her lips. As he takes in her appearance, his gut clenches, anger following close on the heels of his attraction.

_What. The. Hell._

He rolls down the passenger-side window. Snow begins to fall into his car.

“Get in,” he tells her.

She stares back at him, sizing him up. There is something hard and desperate in those eyes, but not weak. Ben can tell just by looking at her that she’s like him - a fighter, a survivor. The girl bites her cracked lower lip, weighing the cold against the dangers of getting into a car with a stranger.

She yanks open the door and gets inside. Fearless.

Ben cranks the heat up as high as it will go and shucks out of his coat, handing it to her. Still shivering, she pulls it on in the tight space. It swallows her, the sleeves hanging down past her fingertips.

Ben drives, glancing every so often at her out of the corner of his eye. She stares silently out the passenger-side window, watching the world outside blur into a white haze. After a few minutes, she wipes wetness from her cheeks, and Ben realizes that it’s not from the snow anymore. Her lip quivers and she presses a hand over her mouth, trying to contain the choked sob at the back of her throat. New tears appear to replace the old ones.

Her hair drips, drips, drips with melted snow, her clothes soaking the seat of the car as they thaw. Her hair looks as though it hasn’t been washed or combed in days, the white t-shirt under her jacket is stained with grease and oil, and there are rips in her jeans that he doubts are artful. Her shoes are cheap department store sneakers and, if her height is any indication, too small for her.

Even after she stops crying, Ben doesn’t interrupt the silence, not even to ask her where she lives. He just drives them back into town, down Main Street. On either side of the road, there are evergreen trees strung with bright red and white lights. The church windows glow from inside and the shops are decorated with winter wreaths on their doors and holly around their windows. He drives until they reach the grand old houses of Tuanul, their Tudor-style homes picturesque against the pristine winter landscape.

He pulls into the driveway and parks the car outside his house. The girl looks at the two-story A-frame numbly. The warm golden light from the neighbors’ windows spills out onto the snowy front yard. The strings of holiday lights that his parents wound around the porch rail and across the edge of the roof are reflected in her hollow eyes.

“I’ll be right back,” he says quietly. “Stay here.”

Ben leaves the keys in the car to keep the heat running. She could steal the damn thing and he wouldn’t care.

 

**VI.**

 

Ben’s house is empty, his parents still at work, so he doesn’t have to worry about what he looks like as he rummages deep into the front closet to find an old backpack they only ever use on hiking trips.

Then he goes on a scavenger hunt through the house. He starts with his own closet, pulling out an old coat he’d used freshman year, a heavy red sweatshirt, a few pairs of thick socks, and the tan Timberland boots he’d worn a few winters back. His stomach lurches when his hands brush his old letter jacket, Imperial Academy crimson-and-white scalding his fingers. He rips it off the hangar and throws it away into the back of the closet where it will be out of sight.

Ben leaves his room and steps into the second-floor bathroom, glancing down at the empty backpack. He worries at his lip with his teeth, because even if she’s half-frozen and dirty and thin...she’s still a girl. God knows how aware he is that she is a girl. And in his personal experience, girls can be sensitive about their appearances.

He debates with himself for a few moments before practicality wins out over his fear of offending her. She needs something that he has; it’s as simple as that.

So he packs a brand new bottle of shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste and a new toothbrush, and a bar of soap. He finds the brand of deodorant his mother uses in the linen closet and throws that in the bag, too. Blistex. A razor. There are probably a hundred things she needs that he’s not thinking of.

Steeling himself - for both the biting wind and her potential anger - he heads back out into the cold with the bag over his shoulder and the clothes and boots cradled in his arms.

He gets in the driver’s side, wondering how to offer these necessities to her without implying that he pities her.

“I...I thought you might want some dry clothes,” he says, his mouth dry.

She blinks. There is color in her face now, a flush on her forehead and pink spots high in her cheeks. She licks her dry lips.

If she is angry, or offended, or humiliated, she doesn’t show it. She sheds his coat, and her brown jacket after it, pulling the red sweatshirt on over her soaking shirt.

He tries very, very hard not to look at the faint outline of her breasts as she pulls the hoodie over her head. He looks anyways, because he’s a bad person and she’s so beautiful it nearly destroys him. Her breasts are small, but it is painfully obvious that she isn’t wearing a bra under her t-shirt. Unfamiliar heat flares though his chest, trailing down his spine. A very selfish part of him is relieved that he can feel anything at all, because he can’t remember the last time he’d wanted someone like this.

Has he ever wanted someone like this?

He knows he hasn’t, but now the wanting slams into him all at once. She looks at him expectantly with those pretty eyes, wearing his clothes that are too big on her.

He hands her the socks and boots. She pulls them on, chucking her sneakers and wet socks on the floor of his car. Her feet are a mess: cracked and blistered from her old shoes. She pulls on the dry, warm socks, wiggling her toes, and he bites his lip to fight the laugh bubbling inside his chest.

She puts her feet up on the dash, pressing her wool-clad toes against the vents where warm air is rushing out. The car is stifling now, but she seems to bask in the heat, curling her spine back into the seat and tilting her head to look at him.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Just...a few things,” he says nervously, handing it to her. She unzips the backpack, peering inside. Her eyes go wide, her shoulders slumping in defeat.

“Thanks,” she says weakly.

“I just thought maybe -”

“It’s fine,” she says, closing the bag. “I said thank you. Let’s just leave it, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, relieved that she isn’t angry. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

She nods. “I live on Niima Road, right where it ends.”

Ben knows where she’s talking about: the scrapyard on the outskirts of town. Was she going to walk that whole way? He backs out of the driveway and heads west, away from Tuanul, the warm lights and lawns carpeted with snow in his rear-view mirror.

 

**VII.**

 

He should say something. He wants to hear her voice again. But there’s an easy kind of silence between them, as if she is familiar to him somehow.

“What’s your name?” she asks, breaking the silence for him.

“Ben,” he says.

Her eyes trail over his face, as if she’s matching that name to the way she sees him.

“I’m Rey,” she says.

_Rey._

_Rey._

_Rey._

His heart hammers out her name. He wants the car to break down, or for the snow to force him off the road, so that he can sit here with her for hours. He wants more time.

 

**VIII.**

 

They pass through the town again, and then over the county line. Here, the roads are laden with potholes and cracked pavement. The houses become smaller and unkempt, with cracked windows and shingles missing from their roofs.

When they reach the end of Niima Road, there is a cul-de-sac. A long, gravel road – more of a path, really – veers off to their right, trees pillared on either side. He starts to turn.

“Wait,” Rey says faintly, staring down that long road that looks like it never ends. “I’m not supposed to be home...not for a while…and I don’t want anyone to see us.”

He knows the look in her eyes. He knows that shame and dread, like a knife plunged deep in his stomach, the blade sharpened by the simple, oppressive truth that it’s too late.

No one will ever believe him.

He’d felt that fear hanging over him whenever he stepped onto the field, when the crowd chanted his name. He’d felt the weight of his name stamped across his shoulders, the humiliation that it would bring if he told anyone. He’d constructed a wall of lies to protect himself. He’d felt that blank emptiness inside of him whenever he was alone in the locker room...when the doorknob of his coach’s door turned…

He doesn’t know anything about this girl, but he understands what kind of monster lives at the end of that road. He knows that she is in trouble. He knows what it’s like to have no one.

“Rey,” he says quietly, because even if he knows innately that something is wrong, he doesn’t know how to help her. “Is there anything I can do? Someone we can tell?”

Panic floods her eyes, like a trapped animal. “No! No, don’t...please, don’t say anything.”

“But if -”

Rey takes his hand, clutching it fiercely. Her little nails are sharp on his palm. “Ben. Please. It will make things worse. So much worse. I need you to promise me...promise me you won’t tell anyone.”

She has no idea what she’s asking him to do. He could just as easily rip out his own tongue. And yet...there is something about her that bends his will.

He bites his tongue, not saying anything.

They wait together. Winter delivers the night to them early. The sky darkens from gray to black and the half-moon rises between the clouds. She pulls on the boots he’s given her and picks up the backpack, opening the door.

Cold air rushes around her, sending her dark hair whipping against her face. Snowflakes and moonlight scatter across her shoulders.

“Promise me,” she insists.

“All right,” he says. “I promise.”

 

**IX.**

 

In the morning, Rey wakes up at the crack of dawn. She takes a shower and washes her hair and gets dressed. She brushes her teeth, wondering if she has ever tasted anything as good as Colgate in her entire life. She applies blistex to her chapped lips, savoring the way it stings just a little on the cracks. For the first time in months, she feels clean.

She pulls on Ben’s heavy coat and boots, the down inside of it keeping her warm even when she steps outside. It is still snowing...but this time, it’s different. The storm has quieted. The air is clean and sharp. She can hear the call of a cardinal, even though she can’t see it. The snow falls lightly from the white-grey clouds, little flakes kissing her cheeks. The trees are made of glass, the freshly fallen snow soft under her feet.

The sun rises. The white fields come alive, blinding her with scattered, shifting light as the snow takes the sunlight and spins it into diamond.

It’s like magic.

When she comes to the end of the long, gravel road, his car is a dark stain against the glass world. She doesn’t expect to see Ben there, leaning against the door, two to-go cups of coffee in his large hands.  

Rey feels as though she has stepped into a daydream. The snow, the sun, the car...if she blinks, they might disappear. He might disappear. When that doesn’t happen, she allows the smallest of smiles to break out across her lips.

Ben hands her the coffee. When he smiles back at her, it’s with his eyes. They crinkle at the corners.

“Get in,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally meant to write a much longer story, but ended up with this simple one-shot.
> 
> Originally beta'd by punkeraa and then by the RFFA mods - I owe all of them so much for how the story turned out! And this wouldn't have been published at all if i-am-thesenate hadn't convinced me to work through my writer's block and not drop out of the anthology. 
> 
> Please leave a comment! <3


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